Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison
Prologue
The invisible man describes the type of person he is, saying he is not a ghost but a normal human being with flesh and bone. He says he is invisible because people refuse to see him, but only see his surroundings when he meets them.
He explains further that his invisibility doesn’t come by accident, but due to the beliefs and the ideologies of the people. He expresses his mind that he is not complaining about not being visible to them, that it soothes his nerves like that.
He expresses further how someone can feel as if you are nobody and just bumps into you, that at that stage, one will also feel like hitting the person back. He narrates how he almost killed a man he accidentally bumped into one day who hurled an insult at him.
He nearly killed the man before realising that the man didn’t see him. The narrator is then amused the following morning when he sees the man’s picture in the Daily News under a caption that he had been “mugged.”
He then tells us about stealing power from the Monopolized Light &Power for his 1,369 light bulbs which have never gone off in a second. He then reminiscences on how he has been paying for the power before now.
He also tells us that the hole is warm and compares himself with a bear that retires to his hole for winter and lives until spring. He says he hibernates for a time to act.
He explains further that there is no place that is brighter than the hole he stays in and that New York and Broadway are among the darkest in the whole civilization. He says he loves light, that it confirms his reality and gives birth to his form.
He has a radio-phonograph and plans to have five to bring life to the atmosphere of the hole. He plays Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue.” He says he likes Louis Armstrong because he made poetry out of being invisible. He expresses how much he enjoys the music.
He narrates how he saw a prizefighter boxing a local and uncivilized person up to a hundred times, while the latter just held up his arms and suddenly hit the former once and he fell to the ground.
The yokel has stepped into the opponent’s sense of time, which is why he can hit him at once. He says he has learned a new analytical way of listening to music, in which each melodic line exists independently and waits for other voices to speak.
He is on the deeper level of the music where an old woman is singing a spiritual in a cave, the level under that is a white girl begging not to be bought by men, while the lowest level is a congregation of people reacting to a man’s sermon.
He listens further to the thought about black being “bloody “and the sun being “bloody red.” An old woman tells the narrator to curse God and die. She shares her story with the narrator, that she loved her slave master for being the father of her sons, but she hated him too.
She suspected that her sons were going to kill her husband, so she poisoned him before they killed their father. Though she loved him, she loved freedom the most.
The narrator asks her the meaning of freedom, but the woman does not respond when one of the sons threatens him not to ask his mother any more questions. The narrator feels as if he hears the footsteps of Ras the Destroyer or Rinehart behind him. He tried to cross the road and a speeding machine struck him.
The narrator then thinks about how he was almost moved to act in the hallucinations. He decides not to smoke another reefer because he needs to see around corners. He says that he is invisible because he is not responsible but says it is not his fault not to be responsible.
He continues that he can’t be responsible when they refuse to see him. He offers to explain why and how he becomes invisible in this book titled, “INVISIBLE MAN.”